St. Louis is startling in its brickwork. Every home, it seems, is built from similar rust-colored bricks. Sometimes I wonder, just as you can see the

St. Louis Brick by Brick

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2024-04-03 19:30:18

St. Louis is startling in its brickwork. Every home, it seems, is built from similar rust-colored bricks. Sometimes I wonder, just as you can see the lights of New York and Chicago from the International Space Station, if you’d also be able to make out St. Louis’ distinct red-hue. Despite the material’s ubiquity, each home is distinct; one residence might have raised thin brick defining the arched doorways, while the house next door uses inlayed patterns to decorate its roofline. Brick dentals, star-shaped bricks, swirled embossed brick—the pervasiveness of the material is matched by its variability, creating buildings as diverse as the bricks themselves.

Brick buildings have re-emerged in the architectural consciousness. In the Windy City, Brick of Chicago provides tours of remarkable and overlooked buildings which feature stone and terracotta; Tuskegee University architecture students studying their historic campus can examine the fingerprints from laborers pressed into clay bricks. In online architecture discussion, brick buildings conjure fantasies of Times When Men Built Beautiful Things With Their Hands. ”Why can’t we,” these posters ask, “return to such simpler times?”

New Orleans-based artist Jackie Sumell doesn’t see the era of brick in such halcyon terms. Though her new project, Freesoilparty, an installation and performance series assembled for this year’s COUNTERPUBLIC triennial of art and design in St. Louis (which closed this month), Sumell is telling a different rouge-colored story—the story of brick theft, the practice of illegally dismantling buildings and selling that iconic material to distributors who then provide said bricks to developers and architects outside of St. Louis. But her project goes beyond the bricks themselves: instead, she explores the material’s connections to the region’s history of displacement and extraction; a city that sits on stolen land is, again, being stolen. To understand the history of St. Louis’s bricks is to unearth systems of power, economy, dispossession, decline, and manifest destiny; the storybook decorative brickwork we see today becomes a tale as complex—and as sinister—as American history itself.